Amarcord | Westdale Film Society Screening

Name: Amarcord | Westdale Film Society Screening
Start: 2025-10-05T13:00:00-04:00
Location: 1014 King Street West, Hamilton, ON, Canada, Ontario L8S 1L4

Schedule

Sun, 05 Oct, 2025 at 01:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

1014 King Street West, Hamilton, ON, Canada, Ontario L8S 1L4 | Hamilton, ON

⭐One-show-only screening featuring a special talk by renowned Federico Fellini scholar Frank Burke, and hosted by Jeffrey Bender!
This screening will include a meeting of The Westdale Film Society! Open to Members of any membership level, we invite you to stay after the screening as Jeff will lead a casual, guided discussion with your fellow film lovers about the movie, stories and context about its creation, and the experience of watching it in on the big screen in our historic cinema. Coffee and refreshments will also be served before the screening!☕
Schedule:
12:30pm – Coffee and snacks provided by Valentino’s (Must be a Member to attend)
1:00pm – Introductions to the film by host Jeffrey Bender and guest speaker Frank Burke
1:15pm – Film screening
3:15pm – Westdale Film Society meeting and discussion (Must be a Member to attend)
4:00pm – Film Society meeting concludes
*Times are approximate
Federico Fellini returned to the provincial landscape of his childhood with this carnivalesque reminiscence, recreating his hometown of Rimini in Cinecittà’s studios and rendering its daily life as a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge. Sketching a gallery of warmly observed comic caricatures, Fellini affectionately evokes a vanished world haloed with the glow of memory, even as he sends up authority figures representing church and state, satirizing a country stultified by Fascism. Winner of Fellini’s fourth Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, Amarcord remains one of the director’s best-loved creations, beautifully weaving together Giuseppe Rottuno’s colorful cinematography, Danilo Donati’s extravagant costumes and sets, and Nino Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score.
Presented in Italian with English subtitles!
👤Frank Burke is Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University. He has published five books on Federico Fellini, most notably, in 2020, Wiley Blackwell’s A Companion to Federico Fellini, edited with the late Marguerite Waller and with Marita Gubareva, and his own Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern (Intellect/U. of Chicago P.). He has provided the audio commentary, along with the late Peter Brunette, for the Criterion Collection’s Amarcord, as well as solo commentaries for Criterion’s Roma and Il Bidone. In terms of non-Fellini publications, Prof. Burke edited Wiley Blackwell’s A Companion to Italian Cinema (2017) and (with Amy Hough-Dugdale and Marita Gubareva) a special issue (11:1) of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media on Tonino Guerra. He has published on the Italian peplum, Dario Argento, Michelangelo Antonioni, Lina Wertmüller, Mario Camerini, Roberto Rossellini, William Friedkin, Sam Peckinpah, Michael Cimino, horror cinema, experimental cinema, and Canadian cinema. He previously gave a talk at the Westdale on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria back in 2021.

👤Jeffrey Bender has hosted a number of in-person and online Film Talks with the Westdale, most recently ‘Voyage to Italy: Romance in the Bel Paese’ and ‘Mock-busters! Parody, Satire and Farce in 80s Comedy’. He joins us this fall to host the ‘The Ol’ Razzle-Dazzle: The Evolution of the Movie Musical’, featuring six landmark musicals that changed the way we see and think about song and dance through the cinematic lens, as well as serving as one of the guest speakers for Noir-vember, featuring a survey of classic and contemporary film noir.